


Spinning and Weaving

by WytchDr



Category: Original Work
Genre: Gen, Grief/Mourning, Life Lessons, Past Child Abuse, Past Domestic Violence, Past Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-01
Updated: 2014-12-01
Packaged: 2018-02-27 15:43:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,993
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2698346
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WytchDr/pseuds/WytchDr
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A drabble about loss, pain, trauma, and healing. No explicit violence, just a frank discussion about said topics.</p>
<p>Trigger warnings for mentions of past child abuse and domestic abuse, past murder, chronic illness and death, and references to emigration/human rights abuses.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Spinning and Weaving

It was cold outside and the sky was gray. A mutual friend had set them up on a blind date. He was waiting outside the coffee shop when she rounded the corner. She was wearing the scarf that the friend said she always wore- it was a gray color- although upon closer inspection it wasn't really. 

"Hi, are you Kyle's friend?" She smiled and extended her hand. They exchanged names and quickly retreated inside from the biting wind.

They ordered coffees from the counter and found a cozy table by the window. They chatted casually for a moment about Kyle and his idea to introduce them, before talk turned to hobbies, interests, and careers. 

She could see the life in his eyes. He was young, much like her, in fact she suspected he was at least two years her senior, but his eyes made him look younger than his years. They were bright and clear, taking in the life that was happening around him, and she decided that carefree was a good word for him.

He told her about his job working with children in the city- helping them after school with homework, getting them things that they needed but that their parents couldn't afford, checking in on the ones with a bad home life. He was idealistic and she understood why Kyle thought that they would get along. His heart was good and he had only begun to taste the bitterness of life through his work. She smiled, he was like a child that way- still living as if the world was a magical place to be explored.

He saw her smile and it made his heart flutter. She was striking and anyone should be pleased to be sitting at a table sipping coffee with someone so beautiful. It was a rare combination- red hair and hazel eyes. Her not-gray scarf accented the color of her hair as it fell across her shoulders and over her chest. She must spend time outside, he thought as he noticed her many freckles. For some reason she had left the scarf on, even inside. Her wool coat lay in the chair next to her. When she wore it the coat came down to her knees leaving visible only the legs of her black slacks below and her scarf above her upturned collar. 

Everything about her brought out her eyes, or maybe her eyes were just so bright that they outshined everything else about her. It didn't matter which really, he was lost in them regardless. He could see the depth in her eyes, like staring into a deep well. The water could be crystal clear all the way down but if the well was deep enough you still couldn't make out what was at the bottom. So many of the kids he worked with were lost in worlds of hunger, pain, and neglect and their eyes were glazed over as they went through the motions of life. It was refreshing to see someone who was really present and his soul drank from the well of her eyes as they spoke.

“…refugees, most of them from the Horn of Africa.” She was giving him the details of her work that he had asked for, but he only just realized that she was talking. “Many of them lack proper education, employable skills, English, and they rarely have any possessions beyond the clothes they wear. Quite a few of them require professional counseling for the things they have seen and been through. It’s grim work some days.” She sipped at her coffee thinking about the woman with machete marks on her arms that she settled in temporary housing last week.

“Do you do the counseling too? Kyle had mentioned that your degree was in social work.” She smiled, surprised. She knew he hadn’t been listening the entire time.

“Yeah, I do a lot of that. It’s hard for people to get back on their feet when they’re broken. Having someone who can help them make sense of the world, of that kind of pain, can really get them going. It gives them hope, you know, to feel like things change and life gets better.” 

A silence fell between them. Was that what he saw in her eyes? Pain? It seemed to him to be her implication that she understood her clients from experience but he could see none of it on her face.

“I don’t know much about counseling, so, umm, how do you relate to them? Your clients, I mean? You’re not from a war torn country, obviously, so I guess I don’t really understand how that works.” He tried to dance around the question in his mind but his thoughts came out jumbled and disjointed.

She smiled, “I don’t have to be. When I was little we lived in Bristol. To me, things seemed fine, but my father was an alcoholic. Over time, it got worse and he started taking it out on us. It went on for years- hiding the bruises, missing school, you know broken home stuff. It was after I had just turned thirteen when he started using meth. It got very bad very quickly and then one night he came home late from the pub and killed my mother and tried to kill me. I spent two months in the hospital before they sent me to a group home Thornbury. That’s where I stayed until I went to college.” She paused and looked thoughtfully at the table before continuing, “I’ve got my own scars. They may not be the same as theirs but we can find some common ground to work with.”

To her eyes he sat very still, but he felt as though he sunk in his seat under the weight of her words, like he was being compressed, flattened. 

“That’s horrible,” he finally stammered after a long silence.

She nodded and sipped her coffee, “Sure is.”

He remembered when he was child, only five at the time, and his grandmother had died of cancer. It was a protracted battle and he couldn’t remember what she had been like before the illness. Standing with his mother at the funeral parlor before the service, they stared at her face in the casket. His mother cried and gripped his hand, his father gently supporting his older sister. He had wanted to rip out the pieces of the pain, anything that made him feel that way, and forget all about it, forget that any of it had ever happened. He thought that it would have been easier if he had never known his grandmother because then he never could have lost her. Of course, he felt guilty for those thoughts as time went on. She was a wonderful woman, even during her illness, and she had always made him feel loved and special. She made them each their own batch of oatmeal cookies when he and his sister visited. His sister hated raisins in her cookies so Grandma made some with raisins just for him. Even after more than two decades the pain was still there and he still wanted it out. How could she not want to do the same? How could she be so casual about her pain?

“You seem so at ease with what happened. Don’t you ever wish you could undo it all?” The question wasn’t his best, he knew, but he couldn’t fathom her nonchalance. 

She looked up quizzically, as though the thought had never crossed her mind. “Do you like my scarf?”

He raised an eyebrow but answered anyway, knowing that she had heard his question. “Yes, it’s odd. It’s gray but not gray. What is it?”

“It’s a blend. I had a friend that spins her own yarn make it for me. It looks gray from a distance, when you can’t see the individual fibres, but when you get up close you can see that the yarn was spun with white and black wool together.” She was fingering the scarf and looking at it. Abruptly her hand fell away and she looked at him, “How do you think it would look if I carefully picked all of the black fibres out of it? Would it still be as beautiful?”

“Probably not,” he conceded.

“Could you even say it was still the same scarf? Would you be able to recognize it? Would it be long enough to block out the wind, or would it be no more than another hand towel?” Her questions were earnest but not angry. Her tone was curious and she asked the questions in such a way that they seemed to be more for her benefit than his.

“I don’t know. I imagine it might be too short to wrap around your neck properly. It would probably just be another bland, white scarf. Why?” He sensed she was leading him somewhere but he wasn’t sure yet.

“I always wear this scarf when I meet clients and I always ask them those questions. It helps them to understand. We are the scarf. We can try to take out all the darkness from our pasts but what’s left? What happened to what we learned? What happened to who we became along the way? 

“When people have pain they want to dig it out at the root and throw it away, but look at my scarf. There’s no way to dig out all of the black fibres without destroying it and even so you probably never would succeed in getting it completely white. So, from a distance, the scarf would look white and pretty, but up close it would look dirty and dingy and you would still see the black, no matter how hard you tried to get it out. In the end, all you would have done would be to change your image and you would have damaged yourself in the process, but you would still be that same person.

“Now don’t get me wrong, I’ll never look back fondly on my father and thank him for what he did, but I wouldn’t change it either. Our lives are spun from the white and the black fibres. They join together and we weave our lives with that thread. At first it might not look so pretty, spinning and weaving are an art that get better with practice, but over time we learn to make the cloth beautiful.” She paused and looked up. He was listening intently but expression lacked comprehension so she went on.

“Let me put this another way, if none of that had ever happened, who would I be right now? I probably wouldn’t be counseling refugees and we probably wouldn’t be talking. It’s not about who did what and how bad it hurt. It’s about who I am and what I’ve learned, and I’ve learned to help people. I have this gift that came out of the hell I lived through. It’s a part of me and it’s given me something beautiful. Besides, I couldn’t give that up if I wanted to- why bother trying?”

He leaned back in his chair, bringing his coffee cup to his knee and holding it there. He gazed out the window onto the street and thought of his grandmother. He had heard her say one day to his mother, “Now, Carolyn, you know there’s no such thing as a free lunch.” He had misunderstood the meaning and had tried to give his grandmother two bob when they sat down to lunch, but she just handed it back smiling. Of course, he had since learned what the saying meant, but sitting there he felt what it meant too. Anything worth having in life is worth paying for and he understood then that he had paid for his time with his grandmother in his own way.

“Do you always give out free therapy when you go on blind dates?”

She smiled broadly, “Only to those who ask for it.”


End file.
